A MICRO-MINI SEW-ALONG!

As I've mentioned, I'm in the process of putting together a travel wardrobe for our upcoming trip to Ethiopia. This is one of my favorite things in the world to do; sometimes it's the best part of the trip!

Over the New Year weekend, as I was planning to try out a new version ofVogue 8709, I learned my friend Shams, from Communing With Fabric, was also going to be sewing the same shirt/jacket. Voila! A mini-sew-along was born...and was it fun! Countless emails, rapid texts, several long phone calls, quick pix to illustrate button choices and knotty problems...and all along, great support and lots of laughs.

I had made this once before; I loved the lines of it, but my fabric? Not so much.

I wanted to use this fabric, a rayon/nylon/lycra crinkled ikat that I had bought, 4 or 5 years ago, from both Marcy Tilton and EmmaOneSock; this fabric will now be known as BFFH...Beautiful Fabric From Hell. I had made a favorite pair of pants, Vogue 8397, in this same fabric

with no problems, probably because the fabric was used on the straight grain, and the pants are very loose.

To keep you from abandoning me and my litany of what went wrong, I will say right off that I LOVE the jacket I made:

I lengthened the "drape", or bottom of the jacket, by about 10 inches, using as inspiration some versions of this jacket on Marcy Tilton's site. I wore it last night and got a lot of compliments on it. I changed the collar to a mandarin style, in keeping with the Asian feel of the fabric.

What went wrong? Well, the fabric "grew" unbelievably, especially when off-grain, but also on grain as well. For instance, the difference between the interfaced placket and the uninterfaced placket was over 4 inches! Some of the lumps and bumps that resulted, along with the interior as drafted, relegate this jacket to button-upped status only, and therefore will probably not be versatile enough to make the travel wardrobe cut.

But...I have a good looking jacket and the memories of a fun sew-along!